Pioneer science fiction author Jules Verne (1828-1905).

Today is 08 February, the birthday of Jules Verne. To my mind, one of the truly great visionaries of the modern age. Here was a man who could write of skyscrapers and exploration of the moon or the depths of the sea, writing it all by candlelight in 19th Century France.

Somewhere in my late twenties I lost interest in most fiction; the average novel, spy thriller, or artsy or controversial novel just didn’t do anything for me. Science fiction was, and remains, the exception. I was always puzzled by the attitudes held by more “serious” readers–almost always English professor types–who treated science fiction as if it were some kind of problem child that for some reason wouldn’t go away. One in particular whose name I won’t mention struck me as incredibly narrow-minded and arrogant by claiming that science fiction could not possibly take a reader to the sublime heights from which one could peer into the human heart. I knew for a fact that he was full of it, because, aside from the techno-wonder this genre is known for, it very much does deal with people and situations that are as classic as any in more conventional great literature. I had experienced it first hand, and knew how it could move and inspire. That’s one of the reasons why people read the stuff!

Today one seldom sees science fiction being justified in this way; times have given it the chance to establish itself as a genre that is here to stay. Much has been made of Verne’s uncanny ability to see the future, as it were. But it is also true that his marvelous books inspired brilliant minds to bring those inventions about. For all their artistic brilliance, Jane Austin or Nathaniel Hawthorne never brought anything like that about.

Star Trek, for instance, created a vision that has insinuated itself into our very culture. The idea that we can explore the universe and do so as a more or less unified species is a very compelling idea. The space program of the 60’s and 70’s was sold to the American people as the beginning of a new age, and Star Trek was an accepted commentary on that vision. That dream died when the moon was reached and the space program had played out its true political purpose. But Star Trek perpetuated that vision to this day in a way that real space travel has seldom done since Apollo 11 landed at Tranquility Base.

The point is that science fiction’s value is not predictive so much as it is provocative. History, one of my college professors was fond of saying, is primarily about the advance of technology since humans are pretty much the same as they have always been. Technology is the change alongside the continuity of humanity. Science fiction can reasonably be said to drive much of that change. Our language owes the term “cyberspace” to William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which first articulated the idea of a fully-realized cybernetic environment where people worked. Gibson wrote his novel on a 1930’s-vintage manual typewriter. Before that, John Brunner’s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider anticipated many of the social ills and problems of an all-encompassing computer network that brought both tremendous convenience and whole new reasons for paranoia. It’s pages remain disturbingly prescient. Neal Stephenson’s marvelous novel Snow Crash gave us avatars and social networking. The story is told of a Silicon Valley start-up company in which the CEO slammed a copy of Snow Crash on the conference table in front of his employees and said, “That’s out business plan!”

Battle with a giant squid from an early edition of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

What does it say about a type of literature that can move people and companies and nations to scale such technical heights, and do so strictly by the force of its ideas? Think about that for a moment. Verne had no legislators or lobbyists or think tanks in his corner. No one paid advertisers to say, “Hey, we should go to the moon!” or “Let’s build a submarine and explore under the sea!” The ideas themselves were enough to start the trains of thought that brought these things about. Personally, I’d like to see true faster-than-light propulsion, but my inner physicist tells me not to hold my breath, alas.

The same can be said of many other science fiction novelists, some have brought in technology that is far beyond what we can do, or may simply be outside what physics allows. Others, like the bioengineering gone mad in Greg Bear’s Blood Music are too terrible to contemplate.

But besides the technology there is always the human factor. The best science fiction has, and always will have, convincing characters that mirror our own hopes, fears, and foibles. And if some of them have pointy ears, robot bodies, or otherwise do not resemble homo sapiens, we can still recognize the human constants amid the alien and techno-future variables.